How to Build a Roku Channel

How to Build a Roku Channel

Create a Roku Channel and Share it with Family and Friends

With over 10 million Roku players already sold, creating and publishing your own Roku channel can give you a much larger audience for your content.

A Roku channel can be used for many things, like sharing your home movies with friends and relatives around the world, share your videos to a wider audience or promote your brand or business.

Our mkvXstream private Roku channel we built several years ago had been installed over 50,000 times before we took it down due to a simple mistake on our part. You can read more about what happened and avoid it by getting a NAS and not forget to use it religiously. When we built it there was no easy to use guide like this to go by and and it took us several days and a few thousand brain cells to figure out how to create a new private Roku channel from scratch.

Build Your Own Vs Instant Roku Channel

Instant TV Roku Channel is a great service. They make it easy to build a channel.

Our guide will show you how to do it the good old fashioned do it yourself way by teaching you how to build a Roku channel using your own website.

Once you learn the basics of modifying a few files you can then easily customize this channel and make it your own private or public Roku channel. This is a little faster and easier compared to other guides we found.

The method we will show you here is very different than using an app to build your channel. The manual, build it from scratch method gives you full control of your channel and you won't need to forever depend on 3rd party software to build and maintain your channel.

Since you will be in full control of your web host, you can always move your channel files to another web host at any time. You won't need to worry about a 3rd party that one day out of the blue may start charging for the use of their software. Or who may one day suddenly call it quits, taking your future channel updates down with them.

If you plan on building a smaller private or public channel that will only contain several videos on it along with photo icons and channel files, a shared web hosting service like AlexHost will work fine. Your channel can also link to many video podcasts and files hosted elsewhere on the Internet.

For larger channels with many large videos, you will want to go with a dedicated video hosting provider. This can end up costing several hundred dollars a month or more depending on how popular your channel is and how much bandwidth it uses.

This kind of channel will most likely need to run ads or be subscription based to earn enough money for the dedicated hosting fees alone, or it can quickly put you in the poor house. For another alternative to dedicated video hosting for larger channels, check out Vimeo Pro. It costs $200 a year. Be sure to read the FAQ as it does have some limitations compared to more expensive video hosting sites.

A shared hosting site is still required for a web address and to store your images, and other files your channel needs.

Shared hosting from a company like AlexHost offers a basic plan which offers unlimited storage for as low as $11.68/year. Although we recommend a slightly better plan like their Advanced or Expert plans for more storage which you will need for video files on their fast SSD drives. Click here to learn more. We have used shared hosting exclusively for our small Roku channel for several years and have had really good luck so far.

In addition to holding the files needed for your Roku channel, your web server can also be used to host a website or blog, share photos or backup non-sensitive data all at the same time.

For backing up sensitive data and especially your videos and channel files, we recommend using a home based NAS with more than one hard drive.

Before We Begin...

While this article is a little long and may even seem a bit intimidating. Don't be, building a Roku channel from scratch is really not that hard. We included many helpful tips to make it even easier. At the end of part four, is a link where you can get help if you get stuck along the way. Once you go through this guide the first time and install your first working Roku channel, you will find it's really quite easy to do from then on. Hopefully, you will have a lot of fun along the way while building your first Roku channel.

Roku Stream Tester Tool

Why We Can't Recommend Bluehost or any Web Host That's Part of (EIG)

Bluehost and many others like HostGator, JusthHost and a long list of others were all bought out by a large corporation Endurance International Group (EIG) who now cars more about their bottom line and making their stock holders happy. While these companies at some point when they were independently owned did offer great service. Now it's all about making money for their parent company EIG and customer service along with their hosting has suffered because of it.

Should you ever receive the slightest infraction or have a configuration issue that can cause traffic to spike or their server to slow down, they will not work with you and instead simply shut down your account. They are snotty, and unforgiving. When you chose a provider like AlexHost, they will bend over backwards to provide great email support and don't react or treat you harshly when you need their help most. Because they are located in Moldova their prices also cost much less than EIG web hosts who will often offer really cheap plans only to get you to sign up. Then after the first year raise they raise their prices sky high. They know full well they moving all your files from a web host provider is a big deal. Most don't and simply put up with poor service because it is a lot of work

AlexHost web servers are fast with all SSD drives for great performance. Their customer service is excellent and they almost immediately reply within hours by email and will help you get your website set up and running quickly.

While you may see many reviews in support of the web hosts run by EIG, many are paid reviews, or bloggers and affiliate that are getting paid a high commission to promote them. In all transparency, we also make a small commission should you sign up with AlexHost. Honestly we would be paid a lot more to promote Bluehost, but our experience with their Compliance Department has left a bitter taste and we will no longer finacnially support or promote any web hosting company owned by EIG.

Here are the web hosting companies owned by EIG and these are the ones that you may want to avoid to host your Roku channel or website.

STEP 1.Sign up to be a Roku Developer

Once you have your account you will want to Sign Up as a Roku Developer. Unlike Apple and Google, there is no charge to become a Roku developer and the software is free to download. The latest Roku developer SDK tools are here.

Now download the Roku SDK software and save it on your computer where you can find it for future reference. It has some good examples you can follow especially when creating multiple categories and sub-categories for your channel. These can be found in the RokuSDK\source\videoplayer\xml folder. In part four we will show you where you can download some more.

In 2019 All Roku channels built using the old Brightscript programming language will be disabled. Roku has provided a new Simple Video Player that uses their new SceneGraph (RSG) code so it won't require updating. You can download and build your channel based on this template.

If you already built your channel, just move your images over and make a few edits to the Sample Video Player and you will be ready for 2019.

STEP 2. Turn On Developer Mode on Your Roku

This is a special mode that must be turned on before you will be able to upload your channel to Roku.

Use your remote and press the button in the following order:

Home 3x, Up 2x, Right, Left, Right, Left, Right

This may take several tries to get in, once in you will come to a screen on your TV asking you to confirm, then agree to a long list of legal mumbo jumbo by accepting their terms. If you have a newer Roku, it may also ask you to enter a four digit password. Be sure to write it down because you will need it to log in and upload your channel to your Roku player. It will also show your Roku IP address link and a your login name: rokudev, be sure to write all this info down. You will need it later when upload your channel to your Roku for testing your channel.

Once you have created your password, you can click ok and your Roku will then reboot. When it comes back up, developer mode will be active in the background and you will be at your normal Roku home screen.

Watch the video below to see how it's done.

STEP 3. Download the Sample Channel zip file

TIP: We already created these two folders for you.

This will make it super easy to get your Roku channel up and built in no time. Later you can modify it to make it your own.

A Demo MyChannel Is Included With This Channel Guide

Download the following two zip files from and extract them onto your desktop.

Click Here to Download: videoplayer.zip and extract it to your desktop.

STEP 4. Content For Your Channel

Hopefully you already have some great video content that you own. Otherwise finding content can be tricky. Roku will even shut your channel down if you don't have rights to the videos you share if they receive a complaint.

Many channels contain content found on the Internet that is open source. Our MyChannel demo contains an open source HD mp4 video trailer of a short animated video named Big Buck Bunny. We also added two very short promo videos about mkvXstream. We would really appreciate if you could leave one on your channel to help share this site.

There is also one additional file we added to the videos folder that is named web.config that is there for mapping mime types for your web server. Some web hosts don't require this and some do depending on who you use. You can try removing it and if the videos won't play than add it back into the MyChannel\videos folder on your web server. It won't hurt anything either way.

Some Channels like Nowhere TV before they removed their channel used to link to video podcasts and mrss files. These can often be freely found on the Internet. Click here to learn more tips on how to find them.

When building your channel, the video does not need to be on your web server as long as the link to the location of the file is correct in the myvideos.xml file the video will play on your channel.

The Roku software is limited on the type of video files it will play. Two formats that almost always work are mp4 and m4v. Files that are encoded in mkv will sometimes work although they can be iffy. Files encoded in flash or avi will not work with Roku. The videoplayer example channel also works with a few other formats like mrss and xml files.

If you have content in formats other than what's compatible on Roku you will need to re-encode it using software like Handbrake. Visit ROKODING to see their excellent Handbrake guide to find the best settings to encode your videos for the Roku platform.

Recommended Image File SizesEach Channel, Category and Video File Needs Two Images. One for SD and One for HD.Some Roku developers just use the same SD image for both.

Look inside the MyChannel folder we downloaded and saved to the desktop earlier. Inside you will find another folder named images that contain 6 images.

Here is an example of two Big Buck Bunny video images from our MyChannel folder.

This is an HD 290 X 218 sized jpg image

This is an SD 214 X 144 sized jpg image

TIP:If you will be using a lot of images for your channel. Save yourself some time, just duplicate images you already have and overwrite them and change the names as needed. This will ensure they are already in the correct size and format. You can use simple image editing tools to modify and create your images. If you don't have access to more expensive image editing apps like Photoshop, this free online app can help add some cool special effects to your images.

Let's review what we learned in this section so far:

1. We downloaded the RokuSDK files and saved it for future reference2. We downloaded two folders and extracted them onto the desktop MyChannel and videoplayer.3. Signed up for Roku developer account and Accessed Developer Mode on our Roku.4. Covered Legal Content and places where to get content for your channel.

Now let's take a short break before we go on to Part Two. When your ready click the link below to continue.

TV Boss - An Easier and Faster Way To Build a Roku Channel!

If Building a Roku channel from scratch seems way too hard, have a look at C-Point's TV Boss software and their library of helpful step-by-step videos which makes building and managing a Roku channel a lot easier.

It doesn't matter if you are a novice who never built a Roku channel before or a seasoned pro using Roku's new Direct Publisher platform and the TV Boss app, you can quickly update your Roku channel with new content, update JSON feeds and upload or update video thumbnails.

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